Performance evaluation of active sub-Terahertz systems in Degraded Visual Environments.

Romain Ceolato (1) , Bernard Tanguy (1) , Christian Martin (1) , Thierry Huet (1) , Patrick Chervet (2) , Gérard Durand (2) , Nicolas Riviere (1) , Patrick Hespel (1) , Nina Diakonova (3) , Dmitry But (3) , Wojciech Knap (3) , Jérôme Meilhan (4) , Baptiste Delplanque (4) , Jonathan Oden (4) , François Simoens (4)

1 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Toulouse]
2 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
3 L2C - Laboratoire Charles Coulomb
4 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information

This paper addresses the problem of critical operations in Degraded Visual Environment (DVE). DVE usually refer when the perception of a pilot is degraded by environmental factors, including the presence of obscurants from bad weather (e.g. fog, rain, snow) or accidental events (e.g. brownout, whiteout, smoke). Critical operations in DVE are a growing field of research as it is a cause of numerous fatal accidents for operational forces. Due to the lack of efficient sources and sensors in the Terahertz (THz) region, this domain has remained an unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Recently, the potential use of sub-Terahertz waves has been proposed to see through dense clouds of obscurants (e.g. sand, smoke) in DVE conditions. In order to conduct a performance evaluation of sub-Terahertz systems, several sub-terahertz systems (e.g. bolometer- array cameras, liquid helium cooled bolometers) were operated in artificial controlled DVE conditions at ONERA facilities. The purpose of this paper is to report field experiments results in controlled DVE conditions: attenuation measurements from 400 GHz to 700 GHz with a performance evaluation of different sub-Terahertz systems are presented.

Mots clés: TERAHERTZ; BROWNOUT; SCATTERING; VISION ACTIVE; DVE

Domaines: Optique / photonique

Romain Ceolato, Bernard Tanguy, Christian Martin, Thierry Huet, Patrick Chervet, et al.. Performance evaluation of active sub-Terahertz systems in Degraded Visual Environments.. Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2016, 9839, 10 p., 2016, ⟨10.1117/12.2223939⟩. ⟨hal-01464825⟩